Jeewi Lee’s art challenges visual perception by highlighting the unnoticed aspects of everyday life. Traces, though abstract, carry narrative elements, serving as residues of past lives – a visual allegory for lived experiences, history, and memory. Lee, with a South Korean-German background, conducts intensive material research, transforming and combining materials for poetic exploration.
Biography
Jeewi Lee (*1987, Seoul) based in Berlin and Seoul, is a multidisciplinary artist. In her spatial installations, sculptures, and series of paintings, she explores traces by addressing themes of the past, presence, and absence. Her works make social and historical events and memories visible, imprinted in materials. Lee works with traces of everyday life or a certain happening, which we do not perceive immediately. Through an artistic intervention they become visible and turn into a motif. She uses these traces as pictorial elements. The traces appear in an abstract and minimalistic form, but contain strong narrative elements, and also time and therefore past and history.
Her works has been exhibited by major art institutions such as Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Hamburger Bahnhof Museum, Berlin; and Kunstmuseum Stuttgart. Other institutional group exhibitions include Sea Art Festival (Busan Biennale 2025), "Ruhr Ding: Klima" by Urbane Künste Ruhr and "By The Sea"at the Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven (2021), "Scratching the Surface" at the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum in Berlin (2021), "Checkpoint" at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (2022), "Indigo Waves" at the Martin Gropius Bau (2023), "Into the Woods" at Kunsthaus Wien (2024), and a solo exhibition at the DAZ (Deutsches Architekten Zentrum), Berlin (2023).
Lee has received various grants and scholarships, including from the Villa Romana in Florence (2018), the Kunstpreis Junger Westen at the Kunsthalle Recklinghausen (2021), Villa Aurora in LA (2025), and several fellowships from the Stiftung Kunstfonds.
